1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to communication between terminals and, more particularly, to a method for generating a communication group having a plurality of terminals and apparatus implementing the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
Communication terminals are able to directly communicate through a radio channel. For example, Wireless-Fidelity (Wi-Fi) Direct (or Wi-Fi Peer-to-Peer (P2P)) allows devices to connect with each other without an Access Point (AP). Wi-Fi Direct is compatible with previous Wi-Fi technologies, supports Wi-Fi Protected Access II (WPA2) to improve security, and makes it possible to establish a connection with a simplified setup through Wi-Fi Simple Configuration (WSC). Also, since Wi-Fi Direct supports one-to-many connections, it is possible to generate a Wi-Fi Direct group that includes a plurality of terminals.
However, procedure for establishing the one-to-many connections in conventional Wi-Fi Direct technology has drawbacks.
First, when a terminal attempts to join a peer-to-peer connection to generate a communication group, the terminal must wait until the peer-to-peer connection is released, and such an attempt may fail before the connection release.
Second, when a terminal generates a group by itself and invites other terminals to join the group, one of the terminals must be a Group Owner (GO) and an extra procedure is required to determine the GO among the terminals attempting to join the group.
Thus, the conventional communication group generation method has drawbacks of latency and inconvenience, resulting in degradation of usability of group communication.